KC3 v0.1.16-git

KC3 is a programming language with meta-programmation and a graph database embedded into the language. It aims to be the language for semantic programming, and programming the semantic web.

You can easily convert each KC3 function to a C function. KC3 is both a language and a runtime.

This is a development branch, for the latest release see KC3 v0.1.15.

KC3 is currently a programming language project, inspired by C, Elixir and Common Lisp. It could be described as C with Elixir modules, pattern matching, and a semantic object system. The idea is to plug modules, closures, pattern matching, a graph database and metaprogramming into C11 with an extremely small set of dependencies.

Components :

• The pure C11 libkc3 library is a full KC3 parser and interpreter.
• ikc3 is the interactive interpreter (verbose).
• kc3s is the script interpreter (same as ikc3 but terse).
• There are several C libraries which are installed in lib/kc3/0.1 using the make lib_links command.
• There is a web server in httpd : kc3_httpd.

All binaries can be compiled for four targets :

• main : speed optimizations from GCC/Clang -O2 and debug code like assert is disabled.
• debug : no optimization and debug code like assert is enabled
• cov : code coverage instrumentation
• asan : memory safety instrumentation with ASan, an absolutely awesome tool to detect all memory leaks, double free, segmentation faults, invalid read, invalid write, general memory corruption errors, etc., just run the asan target for a full report at process exit, the report being empty if all is ok.

Supported operating systems (additional dependencies) :

• BSD
• Linux (libbsd, libmd)
• MacOS X (libmd)
• Windows (MSys2) (no network)

Supported architectures :

• aarch64 (arm64, Apple M1, Apple M2)
• amd64
• i386
• sparc64

To install and test KC3 for yourself, you can follow the KC3 Installation Guide.

Users

There are now four full applications written in KC3 that we know of :

• The KC3 Cairo demo which you can run with make demo
• The KC3 SDL2 OpenGL demo which you can run with make demo_gl
• The KC3 website which you can launch locally with make test_httpd with all the KC3 releases and documentation.
• The www.kmx.io website which is closed source and is hosted on kmx.io servers in France using OpenBSD everywhere. We donate to OpenBSD every month because a healthy software ecosystem is a funded ecosystem.

New in this release

• libkc3

  • dlopen inside lib/ only
  • Typed pointer example : (Facts*) → p_facts
  • Generic typed pointers : (U8*) 0x0
  • make kc3_require and env_eval_do_block more careful about error handling
  • securelevel between 0 and 3
    • API that can only increase securelevel between 0 and 2
    • 0 → (cfn + system + dlopen + dlsym) + eval + def*
    • 1 → eval + def*
    • 2 → eval
    • 3 → ø (no KC3 eval, C-mode only)
  • MP-safe integer counters : defcounter name = value
    • environment hash table for name resolution
    • mp-safe
    • Counter.decrease(Ident, Tag) as a cfn_macro, Tag must be a positive integer (non-zero)
    • Counter.get(Ident) as a cfn_macro
    • Counter.increase(Ident, Tag) as a cfn_macro, Tag must be a positive integer (non-zero)
    • Counter module included at init
  • unveil supported on OpenBSD
  • pledge supported on OpenBSD

• libtls

  • basic TLS client and server in test/tls/tls.kc3

• ikc3

  • Remote procedure call
    • client : ikc3 --client HOST PORT
      • opens a prompt on stdin and forwards parsed tags to server using RPC.request("input")
      • reads structured response from server :

        %RPC.Response{out: "plop\n",
                      err: "warning: message\n",
                      result: (Sw) 5}

    • server : ikc3 --server HOST PORT
      • accepts only one connection and exits
      • works with netcat (no prompt)
    • TLS with libtls : ikc3 --tls (--client|--server) HOST PORT
      • "ikc3: TLS server: listening on HOST PORT"
      • "ikc3: TLS server: client connected: HOST PORT TLS-1.3"
      • "ikc3: TLS client: connected to HOST PORT TLS-1.3"
  • ship ikc3 as a standalone file that links to the right lib directory on MacOS, this way you can open ikc3 using Finder in a Terminal.app and the dynamic libraries will still be found

• build system

  • use runj to parallelize configure and update_sources
  • use sort to have a portable sort algorithm that gives consistent results across all operating systems.

• test infrastructure

  • modular test infrastructure with test/test.subr and test/test_runner
  • use runj to call test_runner in parallel
  • removed sleep 2 that slowed each ikc3 test
  • all test suites run in under 30 seconds now compared to more than 5 minutes before

• HTTPd

  • limit acceptor loop using defcounter
  • achieved securelevel(2) after load_app() by moving all def* into proper modules and using defcounter
  • apply unveil filesystem permissions, works on OpenBSD
    • current dir (./) is read-only and ./log and ./db are read-write
    • using kc3 unveil wrapper that soft fails on other systems
    • on OpenBSD a failed unveil call aborts the program into the debugger

• window

  • demo
    • unified all OpenGL demos under window/demo
  • SDL2
    • OpenGLESv3
      • Use Angle GLESv3 implementation with Metal backend on MacOS. This provides SDL2 with an EGL/GLESv3 driver on MacOS despite OpenGL support being dropped by Apple.
  • EGL backend
    • XCB backend for X11
    • VT backend on Linux and OpenBSD using DRM KMS and GBM

• kpkg - KC3 package manager

  • Argument parsing as a while loop
  • Added libmd, libbsd and kc3 repo definitions

• release engineering

  • compressed dmg with large icons and a nice arrow pointing to applications symlink

Discord invite

Join us on kmx.io Discord server !

Guides

Follow the KC3 guides to discover how to use KC3 for your own projects.

TODO

• libkc3
  • env_init: find lib dir for /usr/local/lib/kc3/0.1/
• HTTPd
  • OAuth2 / jwt
  • dynamic router
    • def_route(:get, "/user/:id/articles/*slug/edit", UserArticlesController.edit)
• tls
• fx
  • chaining of audio and video previews (folder as a playlist)
  • tags
    • create
      • POST "/tag/:tag/*path"
    • delete
      • DELETE "/tag/:tag/*path"
    • recursive
  • properties
    • recursive
• libkc3
  • unions
  • enums
  • hash-table as a KC3 value (map ?)
  • special operators hash table
  • pass by reference and reference counting in all data structures
    • array
    • cow
    • frame
    • list
    • map
  • base-specific big floats
  • macro cast : (Macro) fn (x) { x }
  • pretty printer
    • 80 columns (\n)
  • tags
    • generic walker
    • height function (TAG_VOID: 1, TAG_TUPLE: (1+ (max (height tuple->tags))))
    • has_ident
    • collect_idents
  • facts
    • negative facts : 4 + 2n = not 3 + 2n
    • with ignore variables
  • math
    • arbitrary precision floating point numbers (decimals)
  • enums
  • unions
  • errors (setjmp, longjmp)
    • ffi ?
      • libdwarf
  • control structures
    • when
    • unless
    • switch/case/cond
  • livebook
    • gaussian
  • buf_sha256
  • buf_popen
  • tests